Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Senate resolution passes in committee

Senator Pat Toomey, a sponsor of the resolution

The resolution sponsored by 17 senators recommending that the agreement committing the US to returning the Iraqi-Jewish archive to Iraq be re-negotiated will now go to the floor for a full vote. A House of Representatives resolution may be introduced. Report by JNS:

Efforts to keep a significant collection of artifacts seized from
Iraq’s Jewish community by Saddam Hussein from being returned by the United States may be picking up steam on Capitol
Hill.

With just months to go before a June deadline mandates the
return of the religious archive, U.S. Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Richard
Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are shepherding a resolution
that asks the State Department to renegotiate an earlier agreement
reached with the Iraqi government. On Tuesday, the resolution passed
unanimously in a voice vote in the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, and will now go to the Senate floor for a full vote that has
not yet been scheduled.

“These priceless artifacts were stolen by
the former government of Iraq,” Toomey, who introduced the bill on the
Senate floor Jan. 16, said in a statement. “We should not ship the
collection back to a country where their owners no longer reside.” (...)

Although a similar resolution has not yet been introduced in the
House of Representatives, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) signaled the
possibility something would make it to the floor, although he believes a
stronger stance than that in the Senate resolution is required.

“All these are very nice sentiments, but we shouldn’t negotiate with” the Iraqi government, Nadler told JNS.org.
“We should just negotiate with the descendants of the Iraqi Jewish
Community and to see what they want to do with it. It’s their property.”

According
to Nadler, the CPA was essentially the agent of the United States,
meaning that Washington essentially negotiated with itself; there is no
agreement, therefore, with Iraq’s current government to break.

“Why should we negotiate with the government of Iraq at all?” asked Nadler. “I don’t see that they have any business in this.

More on this. It concerns the claims. The State Comptroller says that not enough resources were allocated, and even when the dossier was transferred from the Justice Department to the Senior Citizens party, the funding was scarce.

Hopefully, there'll be a more detailed article on the subject somewhere.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)